By Wayne Roberts Jack Layton’s death on August 22 feels so cry-out-loud tragic – and has touched a chord across the country with an outpouring of national grief, leading the federal government to hold a formal state funeral in his honor – because he was still brimming with vitality, positive energy and hope even as he knew cancer was stealing…
Category: Personal
Thoroughly Modern Dorothy: Why I Remember Mealtime on Mother’s Day
My Mom and Dad came of age in Toronto during the “Dirty Thirties,” but even by the standards of that era, they had more than their share of bad breaks. Mom was given up for adoption as a baby, lost her adoptive mom at 14, and was rescued from the streets by a warm and generous family, the Farmers. Dad’s…
Women Ignored in Climate Change at Copenhagen
Women hold up half the sky, claims an old saying, coined long before the world’s skies were filled with global warming gases. My sense is that from now on, they will have to hold up a lot more. The absence of debate on this gendered slant to global warming is a silence piled upon silences in the warm-up to the…
Graduating with honours from the corner grocery store
It takes a village to raise a neighborhood grocery store, I’ve always figured. So I went to hear Mary Choi deliver the valedictory address to her graduating class of naturopathic doctors, thinking I would share the joy of her mom and dad, Suzie and Charlie Choi, who run the mom and pop grocery in our area, the Beach Food Mart,…